End-User Report Creation in Reporting Services

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services includes a new end-user reporting feature and several incremental updates. The new end-user feature, Report Builder, is based on technology acquired from ActiveViews in Apr. 2004 and allows users without programming skills to construct, format, and publish ad hoc reports. However, the new feature works only with SQL Server data sources, and could eat into ISV opportunities to supplement Reporting Services with add-ons—for example, Microsoft partner Cizer offers a suite of tools with features similar to Report Builder.

What Is Reporting Services?

First introduced as an add-on for SQL Server 2000 in Jan. 2004, Reporting Services is a collection of development tools and programming interfaces, run-time services, and management utilities used to define, generate, store, and manage reports. Reporting Services can be used to build reports from SQL Server and other databases, such as Oracle. (For more information about the advantages of server-based managed reporting, see the sidebar “Why Organizations Use Managed Reporting“.)